After nearly 16 hours battling fog, ice, and engine trouble, British aviators Alcock and Brown crash-landed nose-first into a peat bog near Clifden, Ireland, having crossed roughly 1,890 miles of open ocean nonstop from St. John's, Newfoundland. Neither man was seriously hurt. The flight won them the Daily Mail's £10,000 prize and proved long-distance aviation across open ocean was possible, eight years before Lindbergh's solo New York-to-Paris flight.
Alcock and Brown took off from a bumpy field in Newfoundland on June 14, 1919, in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber stripped of its weapons and packed with extra fuel tanks. The flight was miserable almost from the start: fog blinded them for hours, ice clogged an engine intake and forced Brown to climb out onto the wing mid-flight to clear it by hand, and their radio failed early, leaving them with no way to call for help.
Brown navigated by the stars when the clouds broke, using a sextant balanced awkwardly in the open cockpit, while Alcock wrestled the controls through turbulence and near-stalls. Around 8:40 a.m. on June 15, they spotted the Irish coast near Clifden and, mistaking a green field for solid ground, put the plane down directly into a bog, burying the nose in mud.
The crash barely mattered — they'd made it. Winston Churchill presented them the Daily Mail prize, and both men were knighted within days. Alcock died in a flying accident just six months later, but the flight's legacy held: it proved the Atlantic could be crossed without stopping, a feat that reset the imaginative scale of what aviation could do.
Key people: John Alcock, Arthur Brown